Actually, you’re right. I’m not sorry for the belief, but I apologize for the hijack.
(italics mine)
This topic came up at a med-school interview I had recently. Luckily I was better informed than you are. Parental Decision Making: Ethical Topic in Medicine
Although the child cannot simply say, “No,” and override your decision, they can gain a legal voice through their doctor, assuming they exhibit a mature understanding of the treatment.
Luckily I better understand than you do that we are in a forum called Great Debates, discussing what ought to be legal, not what is legal (which is not a debate). It’s sort of the whole premise of the discussion, eh? If it’s your impression that I am unaware that doctors and the judiciary can usurp what ought to be the role of the parent, I suggest you go back and read a little more slowly. :rolleyes:
I went back and read very slowly (glacial might best describe my pace). But I am still baffled. How could I not come to the conclusion that you were unaware that parental rights can be trumped by doctors and judges when you have stated:
That manner “under the supervision of a doctor and perhaps a judge.” I simply provided a cite, as per your request.
Also if you are honestly debating this from a hypothetical point of view, might I suggest aquainting yourself with the subjunctive.
Something like:
would become: “Parental rights should not exist because they are guaranteed to lead to good decisions, or only up to the point where the child agrees with them. Children should not get to decide major decisions because they are children.”
TJT, I didn’t want to steal your thunder, but now that you’ve replied and only peripherally touched on this, I need to bring it out.
Bob, you have a chameleon ability to move from post to post without flinching and it is to your credit. But some of your debate tactics are a bit disingenuous:
quote:
Originally posted by Bob Cos
I can decide my child will have cosmetic surgery after an accident, for example. Hopefully the child agrees, but that’s not necessary.
Note that you are specifically stating what IS, not what you think should be. Now look at how you twist your prior meaning when evidence was presented to you to prove you wrong:
Can’t you just admit you were mistaken when you get called on something and establish some other point? I don’t imagine anyone’s mind is going to be changed through this debate, but I enjoy it. I hope you do as well. Hone your skills. You lose credibility when you sheepishly weasel out of your claims.
Sheesh. You are correct, “should” (or “ought”) would more accurately describe my position. As I used it here…
**…and here…
**…and here…
**…and here…
**I dunno. Next time, perhaps you should have someone read it to you. Apparently I need to make absolutely explicit that my participation in this thread has been to discuss the very fact that I do not agree that judges and doctors ought to make decisions that rightfully belong to parents. The fact that this was the very essence of this thread is probably very ambiguous to some.
As to this quote:
**It was in response to a very specific contention from even sven:
**Not meaning, “under the supervision of a doctor and perhaps a judge,” despite the fact that apparently this is the point you’d rather address. I will state yet again that IANAL, and I would gladly accept enlightenment from another more expert than me in law (practically anyone). But this thread discussed the fact that certain procedures like abortion, prenatal care, treatment for STDs, and birth control enjoy a certain de facto exclusion, at least in certain states, from the need for parental approval.
I did not introduce this concept, nor do I know for certain it is true. But when even sven states that, “the facts are that in most states there is no discrepency between a minors’ decision to abort and a minors’ right to make other major medical decisions,” I believe it is appropriate to ask for a cite that would show that state laws see all medical procedures as equal with regard to the need for parental consent.
I still don’t believe that has been established. Your cite indicates:
**Sorry, but this doesn’t do the trick. I don’t believe any reasonable person would disagree that a doctor can pursue any legal avenue he’d like to. That doesn’t mean it will be fruitful or that certain procedures don’t have unique qualifiers as far as the law is concerned.
If someone provides an adequate cite, I will thank them for educating me. I have made it clear I am not a legal expert, and I have acknowledged good cites counter to what I had believed. But even given such a cite, I will also still believe this is wrong. Apparently to people like frithrah, “weaseling” equates with not agreeing with her. Talk about dishonest debating techniques. Oh, well.
I think the pregnant minor has the right to decide if she wants the child or not. If she has good parents, she will probably know what her options are and take those into consideration - I also think that she is given an option of professional help both to help her make the right decision for her and to help her deal with it. (At least that’s how I think it is here*)
Whether or not she discusses it with her parents is up to her. If a pregnant teenager chooses to keep it from her parents, she probably has a good reason - not implying abuse, but there must be a reason why she doesn’t feel comfortable with discussing it with her parents.
I would prefer that pregnant minors have this choice rather than having some parents force their minor to go through with the pregnancy - and thereby potentially make their daughter unhappy and have a grandchild that will always know that mommy didn’t really want me.
I haven’t had an abortion myself (and I am not a minor anymore), but I know my sister had one. She did talk to my parents about it and they supported her decision if that’s what she wanted - and when she experienced the emotional stress that often follows an abortion she was able to go to them for understanding.
I’m not sure this added much to the debate, but regarding the OP, I guess I just wanted to say that I, as other posters have also said, would prefer that minors can get an abortion without parental consent if they want to rather than having a)people who do not really have kids become parents, b)minors suffer from emotional abuse because their parents disagree with their decision and c)have young girls seek out ‘backalley’ abortions and thereby exposing themselves to a higher risk of complications.
-Tikster
*I haven’t been able to find an english cite yet.
Since the pregnant girl is the person who will be suffering the repercussions, she should be the one to make the decision. Might it be the wrong one? Sure. But she has a better chance of being right than anyone else when it comes to decisions about her own body.
As for involving the parents, well, I don’t believe parents should have the ability to force elective medical procedures/conditions on their children. That covers both abortion and pregnancy. We would not allow a parent to sell a child into slavery, and this comes under that same principle, for me.
So, if I think the child must be free to make the decision without her parents’ approval, and if the child fears the parents will take some action against her, why should the parents be informed? To what end? If we argue that the parents shouldn’t have the right to force a medical decision on the child, then informing them of the action is just inflammatory.
Julie
Better to regret your own decisions, than to regret decisions made without your consent. It is their body, their baby, and their choice. One way or the other.
Remember all those girls in the past who had their babies taken from them and put up for adoption?
Their parents acted in what they thought was the best interest of their child. Many of them were wrong.
Just as a I believe a parent does not have the right to insist their daughter has a termination, I also believe strongly they don’t have the right to insist she doesn’t.
Do you feel that minors should get to make any decisions that affect their own bodies or futures, or does only abortion get a free pass?
By the way, it was nice to see this…
**…make a return appearance in this thread. The old “there’s probably a good reason” argument. Tough to counter. I believe one can also apply this to any other item a minor might choose to keep from her parents. There’s probably a damn, damn good reason. Case closed. :rolleyes:
Well, it is tough to counter. I think it’s probably impossible to counter. Because if the child is right, then the child is at extreme risk for some sort of retaliation or, in my opinion, ethically perverse action by the parents she feared.
I’ll try a dreaded analogy:
Say I drive my husband’s car. It’s a '73 Mustang convertible and he loves it. I wreck it. The damage can be fixed without him knowing. I go to a body shop to have it fixed. The owner of the shop wants to tell my husband because it is, after all, his car. He has a right to know.
But I’m afraid that if my husband finds out, he will harm me.
What’s the right thing for the body shop owner to do? If we compare the offense being done to my husband, it’s nothing compared to the risk to me. Sure, there would be some women who would make something up, just as there would be some teens who would do so. But I would be very willing to take the chance that the woman or the child was a liar simply because the repercussions for not believing them would be too severe.
And, frankly, if the parent doesn’t know, that doesn’t seem like a very big loss.
I would encourage any woman to leave a man of whom she is physically frightened. I would have a tougher time advising a child to do the same.
What it boils down to is this: There are a lot of terrible people in the world, and many of them are parents. Their very existence is going to make things tougher for the not-terrible people, as we enact safeguards against them. If those people didn’t exist, precautions wouldn’t have to be taken.
The mother of a friend of mine said to her, in my shocked presence, that if she ever became pregnant the mother would kill her. “I will kill you.” It wasn’t said with the sort of joking hyperbole of “I could just strangle that kid!” It was said in a very earnest manner.
Most of me does not believe she would have killed her daughter. Most of me. I know that my own parents would have been extremely disappointed, and would have loved me anyway. Some kids don’t have the luxury.
And since we don’t have any way to know which kids do have that luxury, parents just may have to build enough trust in their children that the question is moot.
Do your job so the law doesn’t have to do its job.
Julie
Ethically, I think that if a person is of sound mind, understands the implications of their decision, and is making their choice based on rational arguements, then yes, I believe they should be able to make that choice. Some “minors” are more mature, intelligent and sensible than some adults.
The law here thankfully agrees with me. A doctor must work in the best interests of their patient, and can over-rule parents in order to do so. And a child who is declared Gillick competant (basically what I said above) can make their own decisions. Although, again, doctors can over-ride those to act in their best interest.
By child I mean an over-12. Just to clarify. And it concerns all medical treatment.
A young girl who refused a heart transplant, against her parents wishes, was forced to undergo the procedure…but by a judgement in the courts and a written order by a judge.
Not because she was under 18, and her parents have the right to control her healthcare.
They don’t.
I’ll probably flip flop on this in a week, but I’m going to weigh in on the side of parental consent. Despite the issues of having to inform a hostile parent about a pregnancy, I am not comfortable with an adult performing a non-emergency procedure on a child, even one that I think is in her best interest, without the knowledge of at least a guardian. An interested adult should be in the mix to take responsibility in case of malpractice, indiscretion, etc.
zwaldd - fine, as long as that “interested adult” can also be a social worker, if the parents/guardians are unfit.
Though that said, I am totally comfortable with an adult performing a non emergency procedure on a child if it is in his or her best interest.
Bob Cos, I don’t know where you live, so I don’t know how famillar you are with a situation I frequently encountered growing up.
I was raised in the Detroit area in the 1970’s. Detroit (actually, Dearborn and other suburbs) had, and still has, the largest Arab immigrant population in the nation. I don’t know if the “custom” was universal among the countries these people came from, but it was quite common that if the “honor” of a woman was compromised the men of the family (father and older brothers) felt bound to avenge that honor. In the case of out of wedlock pregnancy, the “avenging” consisted of killing the woman and, if known, the man involved. This was not a hypothetical - it did happen, over and over again. Pretty much, it got to the point where a young girl could go in front of a judge and say “My family is Palestinian/Iranian/Saudi/other applicable country and I think I’m pregnant” and be made ward of the court and put under police protection for her own safety whether she decided to keep the kid or not, marry the father or not, and so forth. (There were also instances where young girls of 14 or 15 went to a judge so they would not be forced to marry against their will)
Now, you may think all of the above is wrong, but it situations like that which have resulted in some of the usurpation (as you seem to see it) of parental rights.
When I was in high school, leaving aside the immigrants, even among native-born Americans (of any stripe) we had a wide range of things going on. We had kids having sex in the stairwells at 12 and we had kids graduate high school still virgin. That’s reality. And, of course, we had a certain number of girls become pregnant. Reactions to that were all over the board. We had girls drop out of school, girls have abortions, girls stay in school while pregnant, girls give up their babies for adoption, girls who kept their babies, girls who married the father, girls who didn’t. I just don’t think a cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all approach is adequate to this sort of problem. Obviously it would be better if all of these kids waited longer to have sex, and waited longer to become parents - but it’s like saying it’s better not to be in a car accident. No one wakes up in the morning planning to be in a car accident, and I doubt very much your average 12 or 14 or 16 year old plans to get pregnant. The reality is that it does happen and when it does you have to make some decisions quickly because the problem won’t go away on its own.
Yes, ideally you want the parents involved – and most of the time they are. But I have a clear memory of two girls who were almost beaten to death by their fathers for the crime of getting pregnant. The fathers (of the pregnant girls) were “nice” people, upper-class WASP types with no history of abuse in their backgrounds. Fact is, teenage pregnancy is a volatile issue and some people don’t handle it well. Maybe there’s a reason girls seem to tell their mothers first, rather than their fathers.
I know of at least one instance where the mother and teen conspired to get the girl and abortion and keep it from the father’s knowledge - what do you say about that, Bob Cos? Is it OK for a parent to make a decision like that and keep it from the other parent? How would you feel if you found your wife and daughter had done that?
Now, about minors and adult decision making: There’s this weird sort of situation where a human being is viewed as a mentally incompentant indiviudal for the first 17 years and 364 days of their post-birth existance, then, magically, on the very next day they become a full-fledged adult.
This is not reality, either, legally or otherwise.
It has already been pointed out that doctors can go to court to force medical treatment of a minor against the parents’ wishes. Abusive parents, or those who repeatedly endanger their children, can lose all parental rights. These legal remedies exist because the right of a parent to make decisions for a child are not absolute.
Nor is the consent of a parent always required for medical treatment. If your child is in an accident on a school bus and faces immediately life-threatening injuries the ER personnel will not waste time looking for you, they will treat your child immediately under the presumption that would prefer a live child at the end of the day. If a child old enough to speak enters an ER he or she may be asked about allergies, or how they came to break their arm, even before the parents arrive. This is all done under the presumption that the wefare of the child is paramount in a medical situation.
Moving along in age, at 14 a minor is considered old enough to hold a job. At 16 a minor can drive a car - a potential lethal piece of machinery. Obviously, not all decision making capability comes at 18. You, as a parent, may decide your child is not mature enough at 14, or 16, for these responsibilities but society as a whole feels the average teen of those ages CAN handle the responsibility.
Now we come to the whole question of sex, birth control, STD’s, pregancy, etc.
The tricky bit is that, at least these days, human beings in the western world are becoming physically mature before they are mentally mature. Used to be girls didn’t menstruate, and did not become pregnant, much before 16 and often not until 18. Now we have physically adult 12 year olds who must deal with all the urgings of an adult body 6 years earlier than used to be the norm. Boys, too, are maturing earlier and have a similar problem. We wouldn’t allow a 12 year old to drive a car or vote, yet, in a sense, their bodies are handing them the keys to a car or a ballot much too early. The potential for trouble is there.
Now, some parents are aware of this and understand that at 12 their children are already sexual beings feelings sexual urges they probably don’t understand very well and have only limited capacity to control. Problem is, some parents don’t want to believe and accept this, and that’s where the problem comes in.
If you don’t want your kids getting into a situation where the words “STD” or “abortion” are part of the conversation you’re going to have to instill values very young, keep the communication lines open, and supervise them very, very carefully. And recognize that it still might happen, but perhaps if you make it very clear to them from an early age what the consequences will be and what they can expect, then if it does happen they may be more willing to come to you (Unless, of course, you threaten to kill them in the event a pregnancy occurs, in which case DON’T expect them to come to you).
The reason society has passed the laws to allow minors to appear before judges, to become emancipated early, obtain certain forms of medical care without parental consent, and so forth is because some adults are irresponsible. It is not in society’s interest to allow future citizens to become any more messed up than necessary. Thus, if the family situation is such that the child can’t obtain treatment for an STD then it is in the interest of society as a whole that there is an alternative mechanism for the child to obtain medical treatment. If a parent denies a child education in sexual matters, forbids birth control, and yet the child is pregnant… well, now something must be done and clearly the family system is not coping well with the problem. Since the situation not only involves the present parent and child but a future person as well society, as a whole, starts to take more interest in the matter. Even if abortion does not enter the equation there are many issues to decide, including marriage or no marriage for the two who made the child, who will provide support, should the baby be kept or offered for adoption… While a 16 year old may be considered old enough/mature enough to act as a parent, a 12 year most likely would not be, and that might require court action to make the grandparents legal gaurdians either temporarially or permanently, even in a state like Oregon which presumes someone old enough to have a baby is old enough to be considered an adult.
The thing is, these decisions MUST be made in a very tight time frame. There isn’t time for people to work through their “issues”. If the family unit(s) involved can work through the problem and come to a resolution on their own there is no reason for the state to intervene. If they can’t, then the state must because it no longer involves just one parent and one child
Likewise, it is in the interest of the state to prevent too early childbirth, rather than have to deal with the situation after the baby arrives. Therefore, the loopholes that allow a physically mature minor to ask for birth control without parental consent. The presumption is that something has already broken down if the child can’t go to the parent about this, and it is a means of limiting the circle of damage.
For that matter, birth control doesn’t require a prescription. Much can be obtained over-the-counter by minors, and would continue to be available even if the loophole concerning prescriptions weren’t available.
So, Bob Cos, if you believe abortion is murder, and you don’t want your children obtaining birth control or any form of medical care outside of your knowledge and consent then do the right thing long before they’re teenagers:
- Talk to your kids in an age-appropriate manner about sex, in accordance with your beliefs
- Don’t threaten to kill them if anyone turns up pregnant - even as a joke.
- Teach your daughters how to say “no” to bad situations and mean it
- Teach your sons what “no” means and that they have to respect it
- Tell them you’ll always love them and they’ll always be your kids no matter what mistakes they make.
- Tell them that if they do get into a bad fix your beliefs close off options X, Y, Z but A. B. and C are still open and you’ll do whatever you can to help them make the best of a bad situation.
Because that’s what it takes to have your kids be honest with you - assurance that, no matter how badly they screw up their parents won’t abandon them or beat them to death. For sure they’ll hear stories - they might even know people who suffer those fates by the time they hit high school. But if they know what they can expect if the worst comes to pass they’ll be that much more likely to do the right thing rather than compound one mistake with another.
I agree…a social worker would be appropriate. Not sure what your point was with that second statement…did you mean you’d be comfortable even without the knowledge of an ‘interested adult’?
I think you vastly misunderstand teenage girls. I think it’s rare that a girl would tell her parents.
If I conceded that in the event of rape my parental rights could be suspended, would you concede that unless that condition occurs, that they should not be?
Also, it is true that in my world, none of the people I knew choose their on high school save one. He went to a school for perfoming arts. Last time I saw him, he was getting me a slurpee…
Hey the Irish,
Not sure where you live, but here in Philadelphia, fundementalist Christians have been taken to court in order to force them to allow life saving treatment. The doctor had no right to begin the treatment without parental consent. Christ, even mentally retarded rape victims have court intervention to make sure EVERYONE’s rights are respected, the girl, the care taker, the court appointed advocate.
Do you really live in some magical world where doctors are imune to lawsuits and act in such a dangerous and illegal manner?
I guess they don’t pay malpractice premiums out where you are. Out here, there is only one treatment they would perform without my expressed written consent, abortion.